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“Please be advised that Senator Kenny will not be commenting on the report by the Special Arbitrator at this time.”

Who does that? What level of egomania makes Colin Kenny send out a press release saying he has nothing to say about being caught with dodgy Senate expenses?

He’s like a toddler who shuts his eyes tight under the impression it makes him invisible. In KennyWorld, if the senator doesn’t comment, no one else can either. And my dear readers, you know that’s not true. Together, we laugh silently.

Why are expenses always so fraught? Even if you tell the truth, you’re in trouble. I sympathized with the dismissed Toronto Pan Am Games executive who was mocked for expensing $1.89 for a cup of tea.

If you buy a beverage when you’re out of the office for a work meeting, it’s a work expense. It’s very easy to say a well-paid official should always buy his own tea but if he weren’t working, he wouldn’t be paying $1.20 for a cup of hot water at Pearson Airport, he’d be at home having a lovely life. Let a person in charge of a multibillion project soak his little tea bag, what of it.

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But Kenny lived in an alternate fattened galaxy, as two reports — one by the very fine Auditor-General Michael Ferguson and the other by a genteel but clearly aghast former Supreme Court justice — make clear. Ian Binnie found Kenny and his artfully scheduled breakfasts in Toronto strange, so very strange.

Binnie was studying expense claims by 14 senators who appealed the initial decision. Whatever the Senate was like in olden times — I’m a Toronto person, not an Ottawa person and this is not my milieu — I always assumed Stephen Harper appointed some senators in order to discredit the institution and build more support for an elected Senate. As a tactic, it wasn’t bad.

But these senators of whatever party, honestly. If you’re nailed on your expenses by the auditor-general, admit wrongdoing and pay up or resign. Do the decent thing. Don’t be a Wallin about it, even if you think Binnie is going to give you an easier ride than you got last year. And Binnie did, in one particular case rightly so.

Sen. Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu came to the Senate in 2010 to continue campaigning for a cause, victims’ rights. His daughter had been hideously murdered in 2002 by a convicted sex offender. Just over one year later, his younger daughter died in a highway car accident. In 2014 his personal life was in chaos, as the lives of such bereaved parents will always be, which caused confusion over the definition of his residence.

The auditor-general said victims’ rights were a “private interest” that was not converted into a public interest by his Senate appointment, but Binnie disagreed and allowed the rejected expenses.

Many senators seem to have causes that are irretrievably part of the public good — Sen. Jim Munson nobly fights for disabled children, for instance — but how is their usefulness to be defined? Must a belief suddenly sprout only after appointment to the Senate?

No. But what is to be done with Kennys? Appointed in 1984, Kenny was notorious even before his taxpayer-funded so-called work trips — “there’s an air of artificiality around many,” wrote Binnie delicately — for being accused of sexual harassment of a female staffer. He was cleared after an investigation by a security firm although nine other women contacted the CBC with complaints. Two of them were employees at Kenny’s tanning salon.

Of course he owns a tanning salon. The 22 pages on Kenny reveal his weird enclosed life. We paid for him to fly business class to “lipo-laser” appointments. He hid behind the names of journalists he met repeatedly. (Journalists always pay for their own meals, which may be the only break taxpayers got.)

What a life. Imagine getting up on a Sunday morning and dragging yourself to an 8:30 breakfast with committee-less Colin Kenny in case he knows something useful, which he never does.

And what does your editor say? “Kenny? Again?”

Kenny, this cosseted buffered man, is a repeat expenser who owes $27,458.77 and has 30 days to pay. What if he doesn’t pay it? What then?

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